The Forty Miles to Speech Therapy

She’d taken the mail. That’s what she told me. She went to the post office on her lunch break and asked them to hold everything for her, and she’d opened all of it, the first time in their whole marriage.

There were two late notices on the truck. There was nothing from the mill. Not a pay stub. Nothing.

The kindergarten spring program was set for the third Thursday evening in May, in the school gym.

Every kindergartner had one line to say into the microphone, about spring. Mrs. Harmon sent the lines home on a half sheet of paper, in her big neat printing.

Ava’s said: “My name is Ava Tolliver, and in the spring I help my grandma count the cows.”

She had picked the cows part herself, Mrs. Harmon wrote at the bottom, and I had to set the paper down on the counter and go stand on the porch a minute.

But her own name was the hardest thing in the world for her. Miss Jill said a lot of children who stutter get stuck on their names worst of all, because it’s the one word you can’t swap for an easier one. You can say “pop” if you can’t say “soda.” You can’t say anything but your own name.

And Ava started with a vowel. That was the hardest kind. It was the “A” that caught her every time. Her throat would just close on it, and she’d stand there with her mouth open and nothing coming.

“Easy start,” Miss Jill told her, kneeling on the road rug. “Let a little air out first. Like a sigh. Hhhhh, Ava. Like you’re fogging up a window.”

So we practiced it. Forty miles there and forty miles back, twice a week. I’d turn the radio down, and she’d fog up the van window with her breath and say it to the glass. “Hhhhh, Ava. My name is Ava Tolliver.”

Some days it came out clean. Some days it didn’t. On the bad days she’d put her face in her picture book and not talk for ten miles, and I’d let her, and I’d sing something old and silly to the radio until she started singing too.

The Tuesday before the program, she stopped on the A four times in a row in Miss Jill’s room and burst into tears. “I c, c, c, can’t,” she said. “Everybody’s going to l, l, laugh.”

Miss Jill didn’t hurry her or finish it for her. She just sat with her on the floor. When Ava was done crying, Miss Jill asked her who she’d look at, in that whole big gym, if she got scared.

Ava wiped her nose on the sleeve of her yellow sweater and pointed at me in the corner.

“Then that’s the plan,” Miss Jill said. “You find Grandma. You fog the window. And you say it to her, not to anybody else. Just like in the van.”

The gym smelled like floor wax and popcorn from the parents’ club table. The bleachers were pulled out on one side, and there were folding chairs on the floor for the grandparents, three rows of them.

I got there forty minutes early to get the end seat in the third row, where Ava would be able to see me straight on.

Becca came in from the nursing home still in her work shoes and sat down next to me.